


Snow Day

by bullvalene



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 20:07:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,743
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13688886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bullvalene/pseuds/bullvalene
Summary: “The email alert from the dean’s office woke me. Classes are cancelled.”Now, John was awake. “It snowed?”“It’s still snowing.” And then Alex opened the window and started to climb out of it, hand outstretched into the falling snow.***a getting together fic





	Snow Day

“Laurens,” Alex whispered furtively. “Laurens, wake up now!”

“Wha? Hammie?” John opened his eyes blearily and saw Alex sitting on John’s desk, staring out the window with a look of wonder on his face. John quickly looked away and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. “What time is is?”

“6 a.m.” Alex still hadn’t looked away from the window.

“What? Why?”

“What do you mean: why? Due to the natural progression of time, Laurens.”

“Why are you awake?”

“The email alert from the dean’s office woke me. Classes are cancelled.”

Now, John was awake. “It snowed?”

“It’s still snowing.” And then Alex opened the window and started to climb out of it, hand outstretched into the falling snow.

“Fuck,” John muttered as a blast of cold air hit the room. “Hey, don’t do that, Ham, seriously.” John got up, wrapped an arm around Alex’s waist and pulled him back into the room, reaching over his head to slam the window closed with his other hand. In the light from the lamp posts on the quad, John could see the snow still falling thickly. “Wow,” he breathed. 

“Yeah,” Alex agreed, leaning his head back onto John’s shoulder. And John realized how closely, how intimately, he was holding his friend. He took a step back, but Alex leaned back into him with a lopsided smile on his face. 

“Can we go outside? Laurens, let’s go outside!”

It was early. It was cold. It was dark, and John wanted to wait for the sun to come up so he could get a good video of Alex’s first interaction with snow. He hesitated and Alex pouted. “John…” he whined. 

In John’s class at boarding school, he had been one of four Johns. After answering the question “John Who?” too many times, he’d simply started referring to himself as Laurens. And it had stuck, and it had followed him to college, and now Alex was one of a few people who called him John. It felt like a term of endearment. 

“Okay, okay, yeah, we can go,” John acquiesced. 

It took them about twenty minutes to get ready. Alex was so excited it took quite a bit of convincing to get him into the winter gear they had scrounged up for him. 

“You gotta wear a hat, baby girl, we discussed this.”

“Fine.”  

And then they were outside. John had never seen the city so quiet. There were no footprints in the snow yet, one of the few things in life John was willing to wake up early for. That, and the look on Alex’s face. He had no idea how to walk in the snow and was lifting his feet far too high, his progress unaided by an inability to take his eyes off the sky. John felt that familiar pain in his chest, like his sternum was being cracked open. 

John looked away and took a deep breath. When he chanced a look back, the expression of distinct displeasure on Alex’s face as he failed to create a snowball made him laugh.   

“Laurens, why doesn’t it work? Am I doing it wrong?”  

“It’s too cold.”

“Yes,” Alex said emphatically. “It has been too cold for weeks now.”

John laughed again. “No, it’s… maybe later today, when the sun’s out, the snow will be stickier and we can make snowballs.”

Alex was not satisfied with this answer. “What is this good for?” he asked, holding up a handful of powder.

“Um, skiing?”

This seemed to disturb Alex, and he glared at the snow in his hand. 

“We could make snow angels?”

“Okay!” Alex exclaimed, and flung himself bodily into the snow.  

They covered a section of the quad in snow angels. John mostly just wanted to lie in the snow and stare at the sky, and so he made significantly less angels than Alex, who ran around with his usual fervor. 

The sun was starting to rise, and the snow clouds were dissipating. The few that remained glowed pink in the cold morning sky. 

“Laurens!” Alex’s excited face appeared over John’s. John had been working on this particular snow angel for the past ten minutes, and had sunk deep into the snow. “The sun is coming up!”

“What happened to your hat?”

“I got too warm,” Alex said, and then he tried to join John in his snow angel. 

“Hey! You’re ruining it!”

Alex shrugged and continued to destroy John’s creation. “Don’t worry, your best work is the one over there,” he said and gave a vague wave of his arm. 

“Yeah? What makes it better than the other ones?”

“It meets all five criteria for an acceptable snow angel. Firstly --” 

He was so full of shit. 

John grabbed a handful of snow and pitched it into Alex’s face. Alex gasped and spluttered, but then, grinning, took a handful of snow and shoved it down John’s coat. They wrestled briefly in the snow. John was stronger, but Alex was surprisingly scrappy. When Alex tried to put snow down John’s pants; however, he decided he’d had enough. John pinned Alex, straddling his hips and holding his wrists over his head.     

“I just meant to say,” Alex panted, “that it’s a very nice snow angel.”

“Thank you, Alex.”

While Alex was one of few people who called John by his given name, John knew he was the only person allowed to call Alexander Hamilton “Alex.” John had heard Alex tell people off for it before. It was one of those things that made John feel special in a way he knew it shouldn’t, and it broke his heart just a little.  

Something shifted in Alex’s face, and John immediately let him go. Alex made no move to get up, he just sighed and continued to lay in the snow. 

“Why are you sad?” he asked John. 

“What? I’m not sad,” John said quickly. He lay down on his back as well and stared up the sky, willing whatever Alex had seen in his face to go away. “Do you want to go back inside? We can make some coffee and --”

“No, I make you sad sometimes,” Alex insisted. “Why?” 

John could feel Alex watching him. “You don’t make me sad.” 

Alex sat up and looked down at John with wide, earnest eyes. “It’s okay, John.”

“It is?”

“Mmhm,” Alex nodded wisely. “Just tell me what I do that makes you sad, so I can stop doing it.” 

“You don’t make me sad,” John said to the sky. 

“Fine,” Alex said brusquely. He stood and brushed the snow off of himself. “See you later.” And with that he started to walk briskly across the quad. 

“Ham! Alex! Hang on!” John called after him. But when Alex didn’t slow down, he stopped calling to him and laid back down in the snow with a sigh. 

***

Alex paced the length of the science atrium, making notes on the back of an old receipt he’d found in his coat pocket. At 8 a.m. he decided it was an acceptable time for people to be awake and walked back to his building to knock on Eliza’s door. 

Eliza did not answer on the first knock, but she must surely be awake. It was 8 a.m., what could someone possibly be doing still in bed? He knocked again and again and again. Finally he heard a voice from inside.

“Betsey, that’s gotta be for you.” Maria’s sleep thick voice sounded muffled through the door. 

The door was wrenched open and a decidedly unhappy Eliza was standing before him in her bathrobe. “What,” she said flatly. 

Alex had so much to say that he said nothing at all, just flapped his arms uselessly and tried to come into her room. 

“No,” she said, and pushed him out into the hall. She closed the door behind them and they sat down against the wall. “What,” she said again. 

“Laurens --”

“Ham, new information.”

“What?”

“We have this conversation at least every other day. I only want to hear about this right now if you have new information.”

Alex nodded and composed his thoughts. Eliza was so wise. “I’ve figured it out.”

“I see.”

But Eliza did not see. She looked very skeptical. “John and I went outside to see the snow --”

“Hey! I wanted to do that with you guys,” Eliza whined, genuinely put out. 

Alex chose to ignore this outburst. “And I figured it out. There is something that I do that makes John very sad.” Here he paused for dramatic effect. Eliza looked confused. 

“... What do you do that makes John very sad?”

Alex sighed deeply and leaned his head against the wall. “I don’t know for sure. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“You asked him?”

“Of course. But don’t worry, I realize now that I should not have done so. In fact, I have added it to my list.”

“What list?”

Alex was very proud of his list. He pulled the old receipt out of his pocket and waved it in Eliza’s direction. “I have made a list of my shortcomings. Now, this is not all inclusive, I didn’t have enough paper, but these are the ones I think are the most likely based on what annoys most people about me, what I have noticed annoys John about other people, and the situations in which I notice I have made John sad. Shall I read it to you?” Alex cleared his throat and attempted to straighten out the receipt, but Eliza took it from him. 

“Oh, Hammie…” she whispered. She looked very sad now, too. 

Alex started to panic. Maybe he had not explained it very well. “I could try to stop doing all of these things, but it seems kind of unlikely that I would be able to do that for an extended period of time. So I need to stop doing them one at a time, test each variable independently, right? That way --” He stopped himself and looked at Eliza’s face. She looked like she might cry. Talking too much had been on the list. “Am I talking too much?” he asked. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Eliza.” He forced himself to close his mouth. He  _ was _ talking too much. He had come here to ask Eliza for her help and now he wasn’t even letting her say anything. 

And then Eliza was pulling him into her arms. “You don’t talk too much. You have a lot to say and I want to hear all about it, okay? This list is crap, Hammie, you don’t make John sad.”

Alex tried to pull away. Eliza needed to understand. “I do, I do.” But Eliza had all the leverage in this position and kept Alex’s head on her shoulder. 

“John is the only person who can control how he feels. Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Eliza added, and Alex wondered how she could tell that was exactly what he was doing. 

“He hates me, Eliza,” he whispered into the collar of her bathrobe. 

“No, no, he doesn’t,” Eliza soothed. “I think John might hate himself, but he doesn’t hate you. Maybe you only notice his being sad because you make him happy so often.” 

Now Alex did pull back from Eliza’s embrace. “How could John hate himself?” he demanded. “He is the perfect human, Eliza.”

“And yet you cry on the floor of my room at least once a week because of him.” 

Alex could not deny this, because it was true. “Yes, because he is perfect and I love him and he hates me.” He dropped his head back onto Eliza’s shoulder. 

“All of that is an exaggeration.”

“But based in truth, Eliza, based in truth.”

***

Eliza could feel Ham shivering in her arms, he was soaking wet. Why hadn’t John made him wear a hat? Boys, honestly. 

“Why don’t you go take a hot shower and put on some dry clothes, okay? Then come back here and we’ll make a plan.”

“Okay,” Ham replied, but he didn’t move. 

Not that Eliza was complaining, it felt nice to hold him like this. “Come on, Hammie, you’ll feel better once you’re warm.”

“Yeah,” he sighed in response and extracted himself from Eliza with a weak smile. He got to his feet and reached down a hand to help her up. 

Eliza took one last look back at him before closing the door to her room, his shoulders slumped as he made his way towards the stairwell. Eliza closed the door and immediately started to get dressed. 

Maria had pulled her pillow over her head, so Eliza reached out and shook one of her feet. “Hey, Rye, if Ham gets back before me --”

“No,” Maria said, firmly, but muffled into the pillow. 

“Maria, please,” Eliza was starting to feel a little exasperated. 

Maria lifted her head and glared back at Eliza. “You had better be on your way to tell Laurens to just fuck him already and put us all out of our misery.”  

“It’s not that simple,” Eliza said as she wound a scarf around her neck. 

“Sure it is. Does he need me to draw him a diagram or something?” Maria dropped her head back onto the bed. “‘Cause I can.”

“Just answer the door,” Eliza sighed, and she left the room in search of John.  

She encountered him sitting on a bench not far from their building. He looked up when she sat down next to him, and Eliza almost reconsidered what she had come here to do. John looked so lost. 

“I think I fucked up, Liza,” he said, his voice hoarse from disuse. 

“No shit,” she replied, much less gently than she had intended. She pulled Ham’s list out of her pocket and handed it to John. “Here.” 

“What is this?” John asked as he started to read the list. 

“It’s a list Hammie made of all the things that are wrong with him. He’s going to systematically cut them out of his personality to determine which one or ones you find most offensive in the hope that one day you’ll be able to tolerate him.” And okay, that wasn’t really what Ham had said, but Eliza was angry. “So I was thinking we could all save a lot of time and energy if you just told me what the fuck your problem is.”

John stared at Eliza like a deer in headlights. “Eliza, I… I didn’t mean to hurt him,” he whispered. 

“I know, I know,” Eliza said much more gently. Here she hesitated. Would it be wrong to tell John what Ham had told her, to share details from a private conversation, even though she thought it would help the situation? “Look, I think you gotta come clean and tell him how you feel. I think it would go well.”

“Really?” He asked, and Eliza could tell that he wanted to believe her. 

“John Laurens, I have never known you to hesitate in my life. For better and definitely for worse, you have always rushed right into things. Where is that famous rashness now? Just go tell him how you feel.”

“I don’t want to screw this up.” 

“Well, you already did.” Eliza felt it was best to be frank at this point. “You probably can’t make it much worse.”

“Wow, Eliza, thanks for the pep talk.”

“You’re welcome,” Eliza smirked. “Come on, let’s go back inside.”

***

John sat on his bed in his wet clothes and stared at the list Eliza had given him. The receipt was from the pharmacy, for antibiotics Alex had picked up for him when he’d had strep a few weeks ago. And now on the back of it in Alex’s neat handwriting was a list of things he thought John might hate about him. 

But John liked everything about Alex. 

John hastily tucked the receipt away as the door opened. 

“Oh, hi.” It was Alex. There was a moment when he hesitated in the doorway, dressed but still damp from his shower, when John thought he might turn around and leave. But then he smiled at John as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened that morning as he dumped his snow-wet clothes in the hamper and put away his shower caddy. 

“Listen, Ham, about earlier--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alex said with extreme nonchalance and a big smile. “I overreacted, I’m sorry, really, it’s --”

“I get sad sometimes because I… I really care about you and I don’t think you like me… in that way,” John forced himself to say. 

Alex looked stunned. 

“Shit, sorry,” John muttered and put his head in his hands. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough, he could disappear. Why did he listen to Eliza? He could hear Alex walking towards him and he tensed his shoulders, bracing himself. 

“John,” Alex breathed.

And  _ god, _ what John wouldn’t give to hear him say his name like that again. Why wasn’t anything in life  _ fair _ ? He lifted his head and looked up at Alex, feeling very unsure of himself. 

Alex reached out a hand and and cupped John’s jaw, carefully running a thumb over his cheekbone. And then he leaned down and kissed him softly. John gasped, and Alex pulled back to look at him. At the look of open affection on Alex’s face, John couldn’t help but smile. The angle was too awkward for John to lean forward any further and kiss Alex again, so he stood up, bringing one hand to Alex’s waist and the other to the back of his head. Alex’s body was still so warm from the shower.  

“Fuck, your hands are freezing,” Alex murmured against John’s lips.  

“Sorry,” John chuckled. He started to remove his hands when Alex said: 

“It’s okay, we’ll just have to warm you up.” 

At the rate John’s heart was beating, he didn’t think he was going to be cold for much longer. Alex pulled John’s wet hat off the top of his head, slid his hands into his curls, and kissed him again, more firmly this time. 

John felt his uncertainty start to fall away. This he understood, this he was good at. He tilted his head to deepen the kiss and hastened to get out of his winter clothes. Alex’s grin broke the kiss, as he struggled to get John’s scarf out of the zipper of his sweatshirt. “Fuck,” he laughed. 

John laughed too. Alex had such a beautiful smile. He couldn’t believe this was happening. He wanted to kiss every inch of Alex’s body. Alex’s breath hitched -- had John said that out loud? 

“Yeah, we’re just gonna--” Alex muttered, and then he gave up on the zipper and just pulled John’s shirt, sweatshirt, and scarf over his head in one motion. Finally free, John started to kiss his way down Alex’s neck. He put his hands on Alex’s hips and walked him backwards, into and then up onto his desk. John pulled Alex’s shirt off to get better access to his collarbone, and Alex tightened his grip on John, bringing their bodies flush together. Alex moaned, and John couldn’t help the way his hips shifted against Alex. 

“Ah, John --” Alex panted, and John lifted his head to kiss at the corner of his mouth as he ground their hips together with much more purpose. Then John slid his hands under Alex’s knees and lifted. This had Alex scrambling to stay upright, his hands coming to clutch at John’s shoulders, and gave John a lot more leverage to rock their growing erections together. 

“John,” Alex insisted. His eyes were dark and his face was flushed and he was so beautiful. “John, what is our plan? Because I am not coming in my jeans, that’s gross.”

John grinned and pressed his forehead against Alex’s. “Okay, baby girl, okay,” he chuckled as he continued to roll his hips into Alex.  

Alex sucked in a sharp breath and bit his lower lip hard. John grinned and ducked his head, pulling Alex’s lip into his own mouth instead and running his tongue over the indents Alex had made. Hooking his left arm more securely around John’s neck, Alex let his right hand travel down the hard planes of John’s chest to where he could feel his abdominal muscles flexing as he ground Alex into the edge of the desk. 

Alex had known John was stronger than him. They lived together, and it wasn’t like Alex had never seen him shirtless before, either. In fact, seeing John shirtless was his singular motivation for volunteering to be a timer at swim meets, which would otherwise have been about as interesting to Alex as watching grass grow. But finally getting to touch John like this was still a revelation. Cautiously, he started to play with the waistband of John’s jeans.   

John’s hips stuttered and he dropped his head to Alex’s shoulder. “Right, the plan, we should take our pants off?” He lifted his head to look at Alex as he asked. 

“Yes,” Alex nodded. “Okay?”

“Yeah,” John grinned, and he let go of Alex’s legs, gently allowing him to sit upright on his own again. Then he stepped back and started to undo his own pants. “Go on,” he prodded Alex, who wiggled off the desk and immediately started pulling his pants off. 

They almost knocked heads as Alex kicked off his pants and John struggled to take his socks off. They both giggled, and John shrugged as he removed his remaining sock with a melodramatic lack of grace. “There’s just no good way to do that. You’ve seen me at my worst now.” 

Alex laughed, and it felt like something was loosening inside him. He hadn’t felt this carefree in a long time. He hopped back up onto John’s desk and started opening up the side drawers. “I know you keep lube in here, I’ve seen it.”

“Yep,” John smirked, and opened the top drawer. 

Alex yelped as it hit the back of his calves, and he had to spread his legs to move out of the way. “Hey!” 

“So, what’s your plan? Besides not coming in your jeans, I mean,” John asked as he set the lube on the desk next to Alex and closed the drawer. 

“Honestly, I didn’t think I’d make it this far.” 

“Yeah, but you’ve thought about it,” John said quietly, and he shuffled forward to bring their hips flush again. Alex felt his jaw go slack with pleasure, and John made a choked off noise in the back of his throat. “I know I have,” John added, but his voice didn’t sound so steady anymore.  

“Fuck. Like this, just this,” Alex panted, and he reached down and gently squeezed both their erections together in his right hand. 

“Yeah, yeah, here, let me.” John squirted a liberal amount of lube in his right hand then moved Alex’s hand out of the way. He stroked Alex a few times and then gripped them both again, buried his face in Alex’s neck, and snapped his hips forward. Alex was not prepared for any of this, and he flailed slightly, unsure of what to do with his body. John’s other arm came tight around Alex’s hips to steady him, and Alex grabbed John’s biceps to anchor himself. 

“God, John, just like that.” And that seemed to be all the encouragement John needed to really fuck into his hand and against Alex’s dick. Alex didn’t even see the point in trying to be quiet, what with how loudly John was banging the desk into the wall. If their neighbors could hear them, it would certainly not be his fault. 

Alex had a sudden image of John actually fucking him over the desk, and the swoop of pleasure he felt low in his stomach was almost unbearable. He dug his fingers into John’s arms and felt his toes start to curl and then… John’s rhythm faltered as he started to come. Alex whined as John’s hips stuttered through his orgasm. He squirmed, looking for more friction. He’d been so close, he wanted to see John’s face. “John,” he gasped. 

John groaned and mouthed at Alex’s neck. He thumbed at the head of Alex’s penis and said, “Easy, I got you, baby girl.” And that was all it took. 

They stayed like that, pressed together for a moment, and then John stepped back. “Wait,” Alex said softly, reaching out for him. 

“I’m not going anywhere,” John reassured him, stepping back with his pajama shirt in hand. He gently wiped them both off. “There, that’s better.” 

Alex hummed and pressed a few kisses to the underside of John’s jaw. “Let’s take a nap.”

“It’s 8:30 in the morning,” John complained. He shifted his hands lower on Alex’s hips and started to run his thumbs lightly over the tops of Alex’s thighs. Alex squirmed on the desk, couldn’t decide if he wanted to come closer to John or move further away. 

“Yeah, but you always take a nap after morning practice, and playing in the snow was the most exercise I’ve had in years --”

John snorted. 

“Yes, years. Have you ever seen me do anything even remotely resembling exercise?”

“Yeah, you run everywhere.”

“I don’t know what you mean. That’s my normal walking speed.”

John leaned his forehead against Alex’s and laughed. “Yeah, all right, we can take a nap.” 

***

Alex was awoken by the sound of a phone buzzing on the floor. He started to sit up, but John’s arm stopped him. 

“Just leave it,” John mumbled into Alex’s shoulder. Alex relaxed and settled back against John’s chest. The phone stopped vibrating. “Go back to sleep,” John said, sounding mostly asleep himself. He tightened his grip on Alex and snuggled closer, planting lazy, open-mouthed kisses along Alex’s shoulder blade. 

But Alex was wide awake now. He gently twisted himself around in John’s arms and grinned when their noses brushed. “Hey.”

“Hey.” 

And then the door to their room opened with a bang. Had Alex not locked it? Mother _ fucker _ . “Could we have just five minutes of peace?” Alex sat up to half-scream at Lafayette. Beside him, John rolled onto his back and covered his face with his hands. 

“Am I interrupting?” Laf sounded delighted at the prospect. 

“Yes, obviously!”

“See, Eliza? I told you they were fine,” Laf called out into the hall. “And you can have more than five minutes, don’t sell yourself short, Hamilton.” Lafayette winked at Alex and then thankfully left, closing the door behind him. 

Alex stared at the door with his mouth open, shocked. “What the literal hell.” 

John rubbed his face and then removed his hands, grinning up at Alex. “You gotta be impressed with that idiom, though. His English is improving.”

Alex tried to glare at John, he really did, but he just couldn’t. John pressed his cheek to Alex’s stomach, looked up at him through his eyelashes, and Alex couldn’t form words. 

“We should get dressed,” John said. “I know Eliza wants to see you play with the snow.”

Alex wrinkled his nose. “I have played in the snow. It was cold.” 

“You liked it,” John pressed.

“Yeah, I mean, it was okay,” Alex said distractedly. He pulled lightly on one of John’s curls, watched it bounce back into place. “We should talk about this.”

John shrugged and detached himself from Alex. He laid down on his back and stared at the ceiling, and it reminded Alex of the way he had stared at the sky that morning. “Sure,” he said flatly. 

“Stop it. Look at me.” Alex reached over and poked John in the ribs. 

“Ow, fuck,” John whined and glared at Alex. 

Alex glared back. “Don’t be an ass.”

“You’re right, you’re right, okay? Sorry,” John muttered. “I’m not… I don’t know -- good at talking about… stuff. But I meant it, what I said before. I really care about you. And I --” John pressed his lips together and gestured vaguely at the ceiling.  

“Me too, Laurens. I like you a lot,” Alex said quietly. He shifted so he could lay down next to John again, and John reached out to pull Alex back into his arms.  

“Sometimes I just need a moment to get my father out of my subconscious. And I’m working on it. Like, I’m actively trying to sort through my shit. And if you’ll let me, I mean, if that’s okay with you --”

“Yeah,” Alex said softly, brushing his lips against John’s. “We’ll figure it out.”  


End file.
